


The Most Important Question in the World

by Sturzkampf



Category: Widdershins (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 14:46:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9825107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sturzkampf/pseuds/Sturzkampf
Summary: From the Memoirs of Professor Sir Benjamin Thackerey FRSW DMg KCMGThere are other uses for Jack O’Malley’s sight than finding malforms. But how far is Benjamin Thackerey prepared to go in pursuit of knowledge?





	

I let Heinrich Wolfe kick the door in. He’s so much better at that sort of thing than I am. We had arrived just in time to save O’Malley. On the whole, I suppose this was a good thing.

\-------------*

The trouble had started when Wolfe and O’Malley had gone out to ‘wet their whistle’ at our local tavern, the Hunter’s Folly. It had been a slow day and it is always something of a relief to get respite from O’Malley, if only for half an hour, so I was not worried when Wolfe returned alone.

“We met a charming man in the Folly, a Dr Challingham,” he explained. “Apparently, he is a wizard attached to the police and has some knowledge of Mal’s little ‘gift’.

“Ah yes,” I said, “I remember it was the police wizards who spotted his ability when you first arrived.”

“The good doctor was most pleasant. In fact, he invited Mal back to his house.”

“Truly? I thought he didn’t like to talk about his ‘sight’.”

“Oh no, this was nothing to do with that. The good doctor happened to mention that he has a cask of Irish Whiskey and asked Mal if he would like to sample it.” Of course, that was the one thing that O’Malley would not be able to resist. He is always complaining about the good Scotch whisky on sale in Widdershins and how it does not compare to the true ‘water of life’ from back home. Apparently Scotch has too much taste, and savouring your drink interferes with the serious business of getting blind drunk.

“Whiskey? A shame it wasn’t Amontillado.”

“Now, now, you are being disobliging again.”

“Oh please, I’m sure O’Malley will be back in time for the next meal.”

But he wasn’t. As the clock ticked on, and he was an hour late and then two hours late, I became more and more annoyed while Wolfe became more and more worried. Finally, he insisted that we go out and search. I proposed that we start at the police station, where we would no doubt find our missing Irishman drunk and incapable in one of the cells. Wolfe, with a more charitable outlook, decided that we should start at the doctor’s house on Nelson Street, so there was nothing for it but to walk to the gentrified side of town on the other side of the river.

The door of Doctor Challingham’s large town house was opened by a maid, who informed us that the Master was not at home, and by ‘not at home’ she meant he had been out of the house since morning, rather than that he didn’t want to see us. Wolfe started up a conversation with the girl and within two minutes had her giggling, within four minutes had obtained an invitation to meet her for a drink on her day off and within five minutes had learned the address of a house in the poorer part of Widdershins that the doctor rented for ‘private research’.

We traipsed back across the river to the cheap and run-down house in Sopel Road. It looked shut up, with no lights showing. By this time, Wolfe was starting to get seriously alarmed.

“But O’Malley would not have gone if the doctor had meant him any harm.” I reassured him. “He would be able to see any malicious intent by looking at the spirit above his head.”

“You forget that the doctor is also a wizard,” replied Wolfe, “and so Mal will only see a large glowing aura that gives him a headache, with the mere colour an uncertain guide to the state of mind. But I must admit, I could have sworn that the good doctor was nothing but delighted to have encountered Mal and bore him no ill will whatsoever.”

We knocked at the door. Unsurprisingly, there was no answer.

 “See,” I told Wolfe. “There’s no-one here. Let’s go back to the police station and pick him up. I suppose I will have to find the bail again.” Wolfe was not about to give up so easily.

“Hello Mal!” he shouted at the peeling paintwork on the shuttered windows. “Are you here?!”

We heard O’Malley’s unpleasant nasal voice calling for help, not from the house but from behind the door at the bottom of the stairway that led to the cellar. Wolfe ran down the steps, kicked in the door and leapt through. I followed just as the evil doctor finished loading a pistol.

I was not surprised to find that O’Malley had been tied to chair. What did surprise me was the metal apparatus strapped around his head. At first I thought it was some form of appalling torture device, but on second glance I realised it was an apparatus used by physicians for delicate eye surgery, which kept the head perfectly still and the eyelids open. So, not all that different from an instrument of torture after all really.

The other surprise was that O’Malley was not the only one tied to a chair. Sitting opposite him was a dishevelled character, dressed in ill-matched ragged clothes with a mass of matted long hair and beard. Impossible as it might sound, he actually managed to make O’Malley look smart. Clearly, the man was a tramp; a common vagrant. The two chairs were facing each other, so O’Malley in his medical apparatus had no option but to look directly at the tramp.

Wolfe, ever the man of action, rushed across the room and tackled Dr Challingham before he could use his pistol. He grabbed the man’s wrist, forced him to drop the gun and then twisted his arm behind his back. I came over and picked up the weapon to make sure it was safe. Despite his small size, Dr Challingham struggled like a mad man and it was all Wolfe could do to hold on to him.

“You fools!” the villain yelled. “You’ll ruin everything! Don’t you see what I’m trying to do?! We could find the answer to the most important question in the world!”

“What are you talking about?” I exclaimed impatiently. Clearly the man had been indulging in recreational narcotics.

“What happens when we die of course! This O’Malley can see men’s souls. So he can see what happens to them at the point of death. Do they fade away into nothingness and oblivion? Are they carried up to heaven by Angels or dragged down to Hell by the Devil? Do they become detached from the dead body and wander the Earth as ghosts? Do they enter a higher level of cosmic being? He can tell us, and all he has to do is watch what happens when I shoot this useless vagrant and tell us what he sees!”

I gasped at the implications. Why had this never occurred to me before?

“But surely, this is not worth taking another’s life?” Wolfe objected.

“Oh please, this will be the most important knowledge in the history of mankind. Surely it is worth the life of one tramp.”

“Tha’s fine t’anks I get for servin’ me country fightin’ Boney,” grumbled the tramp. “I bin through Flanders, Portugal an’ Spain, o’er…” He would have said more, but he succumbed to a dreadful fit of coughing, spraying spittle around the room. I took a step backwards. He was bound to be contagious.

“Ridiculous,” sneered Challingham. “You’ve never been further than Wormwood Scrubs. All your life you’ve been nothing more than a petty thief, thug and drunkard, in and out of gaol, never making any contribution to society, blighting the lives of everyone you’ve ever met. Anyway, I know what that cough means. It’s the last stages of tuberculosis. You’ll be dead soon anyway. At least this way, you might actually achieve something in all your miserable life.”

I saw the bright red arterial blood in the tramp’s phlegm where he had coughed into the floor, a certain sentence of death. I took another step backwards.

“Yeah, all interestin’ and that,” complained O’Malley from his chair, “but mebbe now ye cud untie me and get this thing off me ‘ead.”

“I don’t think so,” I said and straightened my arm, cocked the pistol, and pointed it at the tramp’s head. “He’s right. This is the most important question that mankind has ever asked, and we can discover the answer today, right here, right now.”

“No, that is wrong!” exclaimed Wolfe, sounding as near to being angry as I have ever heard him. “A man’s life is not worth less, just because he is a criminal and a vagrant!”

“But he’ll be dead in a ditch within a fortnight,” I replied. “What difference will it make? And this way, at least his death – and his life – will not have been in vain.”

“But Ben, you are too good a man to commit murder. They will take you and hang you like a common criminal.”

“But we’d know! We’d all know! Mankind would no longer live in fear and ignorance.” My finger tightened on the trigger, but I did not fire. The tramp looked at me with wide frightened eyes, his skin a glassy white beneath the grime and unkempt hair.

“What are you waiting for!” screamed Dr Challingham, struggling in Wolfe’s grasp. “Shoot him! Shoot him!! SHOOT!! HIM!!”

Wolfe looked almost irritated, torn between the need to hold his prisoner and intervene on behalf of the tramp. Grasping the doctor by his jacket he held him at arm’s length and hit him very hard on the chin with full force of his strong right arm.

“ _Tut mir leid_ ,” he apologised as the little man folded up unconscious on the floor. Then he advanced towards me, his arm outstretched.

“Come friend Ben, give me the gun. You know it is wrong to take the life of another. And as for this question, we will all discover the truth far too soon will we not? And some us have faith that there can be but one answer.”

My hand shook, but I still could not pull the trigger. Then Wolfe moved between me and the tramp and the decision was made. I lowered the pistol. With a sign of relief, Wolfe came up to me and gently took it from my hand, un-cocked it and put it in his pocket. Then he crossed over to O’Malley and removed the cruel mechanism that held his eyes open and undid the bindings tying him to the chair. As might be expected, O’Malley took his rescue with bad grace.

“Wha’ is it w’ this bl**dy place and cellars anyway? We sh’d a stayed on t’ bl**dy train when we ‘ad the chance! And as for you,“ he shook his fist at me in anger, “ye’s a bl**dy disgrace, ye know that.” With that he hurried to the door, pausing only to light one of his disgusting roll-ups and deliver a vicious kick to Dr Challingham, who was lying semi-concious on the cellar floor.

Meanwhile, Wolfe was untying the tramp, who also showed not the least iota of gratitude.

“Ye b*sta*rds”, he snarled. “I oughta report the lot’a ye to the police.”

“Come, come,” said Wolfe pleasantly. “I am sorry for this is unfortunate misunderstanding. “Here,” he fished into his pocket and produced a half-crown, “take this and find yourself somewhere warm to sleep tonight and eat a nutrious meal.”

“Yeah, well, mebbe I’ll forget it this time,” the tramp muttered and shuffled away up the stairs, shaking in the grip of another terrible coughing fit at the door. I have no doubt he spent Wolfe’s generous gift on gin and hashish.

I was still standing staring at the chair where he had sat, my whole body shaking. Wolfe walked over to me and put a companionly hand around my shoulder.

“Ah friend Ben, I knew in the end that you are too good a man to kill another human being. Come let us leave this place and go back home. There, I will cook us dinner and we can all forget about this unpleasant incident, yes?”

“What about Dr Challingham?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

“I think perhaps it would be wisest if we did not tell the fair Nicola and her friends about this little occurrence. She is very busy and we would not want to waste police time with such trivialities, no? I am sure the doctor will give us no more trouble.”

“You are right of course.” Indeed, Dr Challingham was already struggling to his feet, nursing his bruised jaw and ribs. We watched him stagger up the stairs with a fearful backward glance in our direction.

“Now, we should leave too, if only to be sure friend Mal is not waiting outside with a large cudgel.”

“Oh, of course.” I allowed him to guide me towards the stairs. My hands were still shaking.

“Ah, I see you are still upset by your momentary weakness. Fear not, you know now that when faced by a moral dilemma you found the correct answer and did the right thing in the end because you are, at heart, a good man. _Kommst du_.”

I walked with Wolfe up the stairs in silence. My knees felt weak and I was not able to look him in the eye.  I could not tell him that the real reason I had not pulled the trigger was because I had been too frightened to learn the answer to the most important question in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> I know, ‘ _The Cask of Amontillado_ ’ wasn’t published until 1846, but AU and all that.
> 
> Benjamin Thackerey, Heinrich Wolfe, Jack O'Malley, Nicola Barber and the Widdershins universe are the creations of Ms Kate Ashwin.


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